$mind =~ m/jello/i;

I've been turning my brain into jello by spending about four hours every day writing exercises to go along with Learning Perl. It's surprisingly tough to come up with something for a student to do when they only have the first two chapters of Learning Perl.

I thought I'd get around the mind-numbing boredom of writing Perl programs using only scalars by working from both ends of the book, but after a couple days of that, I've completely lost track of what the students know. I may have just done some exercises for chapter 16, where they can use sort() because they saw it in chapter 15, but then I flip back to chapter 10 and completely mess myself up by using more than they should have seen. I ended up re-writing a lot of exercises for regular expressions because I forgot that the/i flag was in the next chapter.

Randal estimates that it takes him one full work day to create one printed page. I think I'm trying to do double that to meet the deadline. Two more days and this will all be over. I'm not sure how many pages this thing is because I don't think MS Word (not my choice) is paginating correctly. It's been the same page count for a couple of days.

No matter, after this it's all POD writing for the next month on the next big writing project.

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I always wondered how actors kept their current state correct when most directors shoot movies out of order to more efficiently use sets, locations, etc. (I think Shyamalan is an exception, but my memory could be failing.)

Having people to tell you what to do is good, but I still think it would be challenging to juggle what the audience has seen of your character up to the current scene and what you've physically acted in the last week or two.

But maybe that's just one of the things actors do and it's no big thing.